


I can be strong

by nathen-millers (TheBoxer)



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-17
Updated: 2014-09-17
Packaged: 2018-02-17 18:05:45
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,459
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2318489
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheBoxer/pseuds/nathen-millers
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bellamy knows stories, he knows history. </p><p>Nothing can prepare him for earth.</p>
            </blockquote>





	I can be strong

**Author's Note:**

> omg so I have so many feelings about my bby Bellamy. so here you go, have a fic about bellamy and stories. btw bellamy is such a feminist, it's so canon

His mother often told him stories about love.

“Love,” she would say, “Can turn the beast back to human. Can wake the princess.”

She would take his hand and say, “Love can solve anything.”

He remembers listening to these stories every night before. He remembers hearing the way his mother’s voice would almost break when she told them to him. He didn’t think of it when he was a boy, and she stopped telling them after Octavia was born.

Bellamy told Octavia the stories but she never seemed to be as captivated by them as he was. He learned new stories for Octavia, stories like the birth of Artemis, Helen of Troy, and Amelia Earhart. He learned stories of queens and women who shaped the planet he would never step foot on. 

Octavia would say, "I bet if those queens were in charge of earth, we would still be there."

And at times it was hard to disagree with her. 

But the stories were just that, stories, legends, tales hundreds of years old. Stories like those had no place on the Ark, in Bellamy's life. 

In school, they didn't teach those stories. They taught the history of what went wrong, not about Rosa Parks or Catherine The Great of Russia. They taught about the nuclear war and about the men who ruined the earth. 

The stories didn't belong in his life, according to the Ark. But, according to the Ark, Octavia didn't belong in his life either. 

*

Earth was filled with untold stories. Stories of more queens and more men who ruined more than they created. 

As a child, Bellamy swore he would never be like that the men who made his mother cry out in the night, he would be good, he would protect those he loved, not harm them.

Bellamy always had trouble finding good men in history, they always seemed to hide in between the pages of his books. 

*

Earth was not a story though, earth was hard, cold, and unrelenting. It wasn’t like what Bellamy imagined. 

He imagined soft, warm breezes and deep blue skies.

He didn’t imagine the chaos, he didn’t imagine the mutated animals or the acid fog.

He certainly didn’t imagine all the death that plagued them 

*

Clarke was like the queens in his childhood stories. 

She was righteous, beautiful, merciful, brave, and good. Clarke was who people wrote stories about, she was who they remembered long after she was gone. 

And he remembers sneering, "Brave Princess," at her like a school yard bully. He remembers the tight feeling in his stomach as she easily takes charge of the 100 like she was born to do it.  
And she probably was, Clarke Griffin, who stood her ground, who did what she thought was right. 

Clarke who admitted to him that she needs him. 

Being needed wasn't a foreign concept to Bellamy, but rather, an old friend who somehow kept calling long after Bellamy moved away. But this time, it wasn't so scary. 

*

History had a way of always favoring who won.

When Columbus sailed the ocean blue and led the slaughter of hundreds native americans, history remembered him as a great explorer. Not as a mass murder.

Bellamy actually thought when they first landed on earth that he could be remembered, that history would tell stories of him and the 100. He thought history would paint them as explorers or heroes or leaders. 

He isn’t so sure now. 

When he shot at Anya, he knew he didn’t have any other option. He wouldn’t, no, he couldn’t risk Clarke’s life. He had to protect her, he had to. Because Clarke was a queen, and he wasn’t a king. No, he was too violent, too angry. He wasn’t a king because kings too often didn’t protect their queens. He was her knight, he would protect her, be her adviser, he would do her bidding and do the dirty work for her. 

*

“I am become death, destroyer of worlds,” she said softly, “It’s Oppenheimer, the man who built the first,”

“I know who Oppenheimer is,” he said before he could stop himself.

She looked surprised, but didn’t comment.

*

The problem with protecting Clarke, or attempting to, was she didn’t think she needed it. 

She was too comfortable with going off on her own, like the forest wasn’t filled with blood thirsty grounders. 

When she was captured, he didn’t believe, didn’t want to believe it. But earth always had a way of forcing the truth down his throat. 

He should have listened to Jasper, he should have done something. 

When Murphy hung him, he felt desperation sink into his bones, he fought against the rope. But in the back of his mind, he felt relief, the feeling of no longer having to do anything, no longer having to be a leader. 

Then Clarke flashed into his mind. Clarke who he had sworn to himself that he would protect. Clarke who needed him, and he needed her. 

Clarke who could already be dead. 

The history never told him what the knights did after their queen was dead.

When the rope was slipped off, he gasped for breath. His mind chanted Clarke, Clarke, Clarke.

He would save her, he would search all of earth for her because that’s what knights did in his mother’s stories, they saved the queen, they saved the princess.

*

The stories and the legends and the tales hundreds of years didn’t prepare him for the ring of fire. 

He ran and ran until his lungs burned, he ran until he reached a half dug fox hole.

His last thought before he passed was if the gods really gave the first humans fire, and if they regret it now. 

*

Bellamy once had dream, when they first crash landed on earth, he dreamed that he and Octavia could restart their life. 

As the days went on, his dream became something else. He dreamed that he and Clarke could be something, that protecting her could become something more for both of them.

He was fool, he knows, but it was dream that kept him going during the fight. 

Bellamy longed for the ocean, for the salty sea breeze that he had never felt. He longed for the safety that the ocean could have provided. 

He shouldn’t have argued with her.

*

The stories don’t tell him about being the last one left, history never mentions the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The books don’t tell him how they lived in the days after the bombings.

He found Finn. Finn had burns covering his legs, he didn’t make it far enough.

Bellamy wished for Clarke, he wished for her healing ability. He makes a seaweed paste but he isn’t actually sure if it will do anything.

Bellamy leaves Finn in a foxhole and goes to the dropship.Ash clouds the air and the smell of charred flesh and bones attack his senses.

He found a singling bullet case, not from his guns, but from another’s.

He remembers Octavia telling him about the Mountain Men.

Mount Weather, that’s where they were.  
*  
They wait for Finn’s burns to heal before they attack.

They wait until dark, then they sneak in.

Finn goes to the control room and unlocks all the doors. Bellamy started to get people moving, he found Jasper, Miller, Monty, and Raven, who was alive and walking, and just for a moment, this was just like in the stories.

He goes to the last room on the right, and opens the door. 

He stopped breathing. 

Clarke was there, she was lying motionless on the bed. 

He walked to her, he stood over her, placing a hand to her wrist. He felt her pulse, but barely. 

“Clarke, wake up,” he said, “Clarke, it’s me, please, Clarke.”

He shook her gently, she didn’t stir. He should have known, life never treated queens kindly, Cleopatra pressed a snake to her wrist to avoid the mobs, Marie Antoinette was beheaded for treason, Henry the eighth killed two of his own queens. 

Bellamy knew he didn’t have a lot of time, he heard Finn in the hall directing people to the door, Bellamy had a minute, maybe two. 

‘Love can wake the princess,’ his mother’s voice said in his head. 

He loved her, he knew he did.

Bellamy pressed his lips to Clarke’s, just for a moment. 

She didn’t wake up. 

Bellamy picked her up, and ran out the door.

He should have know life wasn’t a story. 

*

He and the rest of them walked all through the night.

No one said anything about Clarke.  
Miller and Jasper found a cave big enough to hold all forty-two of them, Bellamy didn’t want to risk traveling in the daylight.

Bellamy set Clarke gently on the ground, he sat next to her, watching her chest slowly rise and fall.

“What’s wrong with her?” he asked, voice rough. 

Of course none of them would know. Clarke was the healer, she was the medic, she knew. 

They walked all the next night.

At their second cave, Jasper asked, “What are we going to do, Bellamy?”

“We’ll keep moving, we have to get out of grounder territory,” he said, pointedly ignoring the pitying looks Monty and Miller gave him. 

“What about Clarke?” 

“What do you mean about Clarke?” he snapped, “We are taking her with us.”

“Bellamy, she hasn’t woken up, we don’t know what happened to her,” Raven said, “She could be brain dead for all we know.”

“We don’t know that,” he said, mouth turned up in frown, “We’re not leaving her, not until we know for sure.”

“I know who would,” Finn said, “The Ark. It came down during the fight.”

“So what? We send someone to go out searching for them? We don’t even know where it is, or if anyone’s alive,” Raven said.

“What would you have us do then?” Monty asked, “Take her back to the Mountain Men? And have them fix her even though they made her this way?" 

Raven turned her gaze away. 

"I don't know. But we can't keep going like this," she finally said.

*

The stories that filled his childhood always said that love would wake the princess. Whether the princess had to love the kisser or the kisser the princess, they never told him.

*

On their third night of walking, they were attacked.

He forgot about the grounders, he had been so concerned about Clarke and the Mountain Men, he didn’t think about the biggest threat of all.

The first arrow hits a boy in the throat, blood sputtering up out of his mouth, spraying anyone in a two foot radius. The blood caused a panic, other arrows followed.

The kids started running in all different directions, trampling others who didn’t move as fast.  
Bellamy tightened his grip on Clarke, he saw Monty and Jasper carrying Finn in between them with Raven behind them. 

“Where do we go?” Jasper yelled over the shrieks and screams of the 100 getting ambushed.

“Follow me, tell any others to do the same,” Bellamy yelled back. 

He started run, he ran until his arms ached and his legs felt they were going to fall off. Bellamy could hear the others behind him, he didn’t chance a look back, not yet. 

When he reached the bank of a river, he stopped. He nearly collapsed, he barely put Clarke safely down before he fell. Bellamy heard the others do the same. He screwed his eyes shut, he felt the blood pounding in his ears. He needed a minute, just a minute to make sure he is still here, still on earth, still alive.

Bellamy heard a broken voice say, “Finn?”

He opened his eyes wearily to see Raven kneeling over Finn, her hands covered in blood and an arrow poking out of Finn’s chest.

“Please don’t be dead, please Finn, don’t be dead,” Raven sobbed, her whole body convulsing, as if she didn’t want to release her tears. 

Jasper turned his gaze away from Raven and to the river. 

“He was dead when we picked him up,” Jasper mumbled to Bellamy, “There was no saving him.”

*

Bellamy awoke early the next morning, he picked up Clarke and walked down the river bank, just far enough so the group couldn’t see them. 

He set Clarke gently on the shore.

“Raven was right, Clarke, we can’t keep going on like this. I need you, I do, and I am sorry I didn’t say it before,” he told her.

He took a shaky breath, “I didn’t ask for this, I just wanted to protect Octavia. But I don’t regret any of this, I don’t Clarke, I promise.”

Bellamy brushed some of her hair off her forehead, “I read a quote once, it said that history is written by the survivors. And I wanted you to be that, Clarke, I wanted you to be a survivor so bad. But life isn’t a story, I know that now.”

He felt tears prick at the back of his eyes, “God Clarke, I don’t want to do this. But it’s time, you haven’t woken up, and I don’t know if you ever will. I hope you can forgive me, god I hope you can.”

Bellamy slipped the knife from his pocket, he leaned down and gently kissed her forehead. He gradually brought the knife toward her neck like she did all those weeks ago with Atom. A part of him wished he could see her eyes, one last time.

He slipped the knife into her neck, then pulled it out. Blood seeped out of the wound, her body took a stuttering breath before her chest ceased to rise.

Bellamy sat there. He longed to take the same knife and stick it in his own neck, to be choked by his own blood until breathing became impossible. His breathing became ragged, the tears descended down his cheeks. 

“I’m sorry, Clarke, I’m so sorry,” he gasped out, pressing his face against her shoulder, he felt her blood becoming sticky on his skin. 

Monty found him like that, his face pressed against Clarke, whispering apologies into her skin.

 

*

History should’ve prepared him for this, queens never lived.

The stories should’ve have told him about that love was amazing and magical and just as painful. The should have told him that sometimes the people you love the most aren’t the ones you spend your life with.  
But some days, when the sky opens up and pours, and thunderclaps shake the earth, he remembers her eyes and he feels like his entire body is on fire when the memories flash through his head.

And another quote filled his head, you are strong because you endure.

He will be strong, because sometimes, broken things can mend themselves.

**Author's Note:**

> i promise i didn't mean for this to get so dark. it just happened. 
> 
> Please comment and kudos!


End file.
